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.localhost Domains

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Re: .localhost Domains

#81

Post by hobo_mark »

octagons wrote: post #74

Against much well-informed advice, I use a vanity domain for my internal network at home. Through a combination Smallstep CA, CoreDNS, and Traefik, any services I host in my Docker Swarm cluster automatically are immediately issued a signed SSL certificate, load-balanced, and resolvable. Traefik also allows me to configure authentication for any services that I may not wish to expose without such. That said, I do rec…

I added a fake .com record in my internal DNS that resolves to my development server. All development clients within that network have an mkcert-generated CA installed.

Not so different from you, but without even registering the vanity domain. Why is this such a bad idea?

Re: .localhost Domains

#83

Post by numbsafari »

jeroenhd wrote: post #35
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #10

I haven't done it for a while (I've mostly just used 127.*), but I found the best one to use for dev purposes was the IETF-reserved `.test` TLD [0]. The main benefit at the time I was messing with this (10ish years ago now) was that all the browsers I needed to test on would actually attempt to resolve `.test`. If I remember correctly, firefox seemed to have issues with `localhost` being anything other than 127.0.0.1…

.test seems like an excellent choice for testing/debugging/developing applications, but for running services you want to use I'd stick to .internal these days, as it was reserved for local domains last year.

This is what I've done for years: doing app development using the .test TLD, and .internal for, well, internal services that are more like "production IT".

I've had nothing but trouble with .local and .localhost. Specifically, .local is intended for other purposes (multicast DNS) and .localhost has a nasty habit of turning into just "localhost" and in some cases, resolvers don't like to allow that to point to anything other than 127.0.0.1.

More recently, I've stuck to following the advice of RFC 6762 and use an actual registered TLD for internal use, and then sub-domain from there. I don't use my "production" TLD, but some other, unrelated TLD. For example, if my company is named FOO and our corporate homepage is at foo.com, I'll have a separate TLD like bar.com that I'll use for app development (and sub-domain as dev.bar.com, qa.bar.com, and maybe otherqa.bar.com as needed for different environments). That helps avoid any weirdness around .localhost, works well in larger dev/qa environments that aren't running on 127.0.0.1, and allows me to do things like have an internal CA for TLS instead of using self-signed certs with all of their UX warts.

For "local network" stuff, I stick to ".internal" because that's now what IANA recommends. But I would distinguish between how I use ".internal" to mean "things on my local network" from "this is where my team deploys our QA environment", because we likely aren't on the same network as where that QA environment is located and my ".internal" might overlap with your ".internal", but the QA environment is shared.

Re: .localhost Domains

#84

Post by nodesocket »

codetrotter wrote: post #51
hardaker wrote: post #20

You might check out .internal instead which was recently approved [1] for local use. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal

In that case I would prefer naming as . .internal So for example phpbb.mtndew.internal And I’d probably still add phpbb.localhost To /etc/hosts on that host like OP does

I wrote a super basic DNS server in go (mostly fun and go practice) which allows you to specify hosts and ips in a json config file. This eliminates the need for editing your /etc/hosts file. If it matches a host in the json config file it returns that ip, else uses Cloudflare public DNS resolver as a fallback. Please; easy on my go code :-). I am a total beginner with go.

https://github.com/nodesocket/godns

Re: .localhost Domains

#85

Post by Mountain_Skies »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #60
hardaker wrote: post #20

You might check out .internal instead which was recently approved [1] for local use. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal

The *.home.arpa domain in RFC 8375 has been approved for local use since 2018, which is long enough ago that most hardware and software currently in use should be able to handle it.

It's ugly and clunky, which is why after seven years it's had very little adoption. Home users aren't network engineers so these things actually do matter even if it seems silly in a technical sense.

Re: .localhost Domains

#86

Post by candiddevmike »

hardaker wrote: post #20

You might check out .internal instead which was recently approved [1] for local use. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal

It would be great if there was an easy way to get trusted certificates for reserved domains without rolling out a CA. There are a number of web technologies that don't work without a trusted HTTPS origin, and it's such a pain in the ass to add root CAs everywhere.

Re: .localhost Domains

#87

Post by MaKey »

hardaker wrote: post #20

You might check out .internal instead which was recently approved [1] for local use. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal

It seems like it has not been standardized yet:

> As of March 7, 2025, the domain has not been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), though an Internet-Draft describing the TLD has been submitted.

Re: .localhost Domains

#88

Post by subculture »

When Apple's MobileMe came out I snagged the localhost@me.com email address, thinking how clever I was. But because filtering tools weren't as good back then I was never able to use it because of the truly massive amount of spam and test emails I'd get.

Re: .localhost Domains

#89

Post by alexvitkov »

hardaker wrote: post #20

You might check out .internal instead which was recently approved [1] for local use. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal

Too much typing, and Chromium-based browsers don't understand it yet and try to search for mything.internal instead, which is annoying - you have to type out the whole http://mything.internal.

This can be addressed by hijacking an existing TLD for private use, e.g. mything.bb :^)

Re: .localhost Domains

#90

Post by [deleted] »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #60
hardaker wrote: post #20

You might check out .internal instead which was recently approved [1] for local use. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal

The *.home.arpa domain in RFC 8375 has been approved for local use since 2018, which is long enough ago that most hardware and software currently in use should be able to handle it.

[deleted]
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